Google is paying Apple billions per year to remain on the iPhone
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/7/24/16020330/google-digital-mob...
Sure, so long as we agree the search results are relevant.
Apple users don't complain that the default Maps app is Apple Maps, despite Apple Maps being a famous punchline.
Maybe Google was much better at some point in time in the past, but I haven't noticed any meaningful difference these days.
Google's advantage is their massive brand awareness. They've done an outstanding job with brand marketing - positioning themselves as smart and nerdy, so people are inclined to subconsciously think of them as highly performant, even without any evidence to back it up.
My personal results are that you can totally ditch Google Search, Gmail, etc, and no, Google stuff is not orders of magnitude better. Nowadays, living outside the GFW again, I switch freely between Bing and DuckDuckGo, but it will always be a pain in the ass not having access to Youtube. That, imho, is Google's killer product.
And then you have things like Yandex which is a tad better than Google in Russia and Baidu which does the same in China (compared to Google HK)
Baidu is never good, every search I do there seems to turn up mostly porn (and I'm far from searching for porn).
Plus the other benefit of Baidu is that unlike Bing, where you would get a whole bunch of results, only to find that the page was blocked in China for one reason or another, Baidu allowed you to actually work without too much hassle inside that ridiculous censorship system.
I've been using Bing for about a year now and it's almost indistinguishable from Google.
Google seems to be better at heavily semantic queries. For example, just recently I tried "that picture where capitalism is represented as a giant octopus". Bing didn't have the picture I wanted on the first page. Google did but wasn't the first hit.
But for 99.9% of the queries, if you say Google is "order of magnitude better", you're talking out of your ass and my suspicion is you haven't even bothered trying anything else in at least 5 years.
DDG's results have been better than google's for years now.
From time to time I sit next to a friend or coworker and watch then trying to google something. I DDG looking for the same information and it's usually amongst the first few results. (for anything non-trivial, of course, for trivial things, any search engine works).
Bing is down to 2.5% market share , global and all platforms.
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share Search engine market share Worldwide | StatCounter Global Stats
Down to 6.5% in the US for all platforms. But is also declining.
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/uni...
Plus Bing having so little share and revs to invest it has really fallen behind Google in particular in Mobile.
Remember that Google was pushing performance, had a massive install base and marketing budget during those years.
There is a huge amount of friction added to a system (in this case, the browser-web ecosystem) when a major change like the default search engine is changed. The aggregation of all frictions is what causes users to alter their behavior or seek other solutions to reduce that friction. If iOS were to switch, some users would figure out how to change their default setting, others would simply see an increase in frustration with "the product" (meaning iOS + web search). It is likely to cause some migration, but probably not a significant amount until and unless other frictions are added.
I'm 100% sure the top search query in any other search engine they place by default would be "google".
I think #1 reason is aggressive marketing.
I’ve been using MS Edge for a couple of years. Works OK, the only minor issue was annoying popups on e.g. youtube advertising Chrome. Fortunately, adblock worked.
50%? Am I reading this right, that iOS makes up 50% of Google's mobile search revenue? IDC reports that Android made up 85% of the mobile OS market share in Q1-17, while iOS makes up 14.6%. How could iOS be contributing half of the mobile search revenue when Google's own OS is on most of the mobile devices in the world?
I find this very interesting, not that the earnings are so high on Apple, but that Google could be failing so miserably to earn mobile search revenue on their own platform. I feel like there's an accounting error somewhere.
Some first-hand reports:
http://blog.monumentvalleygame.com/blog/2015/1/15/monument-v...
http://www.winterworks.de/bloo-kid-2-the-definitive-revenue-...
In fact, I was about to link to Monument Valley's numbers.
I've also read about other counter-intuitive revenue statistics. Apple's share of hardware revenues is way higher than its share of unit sales. And I've read that for many app makers, their revenues on iOS is higher than their revenues on Android, despite there being a larger number of Android units in the market.
If the latter claim is true, it could be that iOS users as a whole spend more money than Android users as a whole. That could filter through to Google in the form of iOS users being more inclined to click on higher-value ads.
Note: The above is speculative, I recall reading these claims on Daring Fireball, but that is not evidence.
Again, not stating facts, just hypothesis.
Yes, but Android has targetted mostly under-developed countries (sorry if this term seems offensive) and ordinary people (as opposed to iOS which targets rich people). Consequently, many Android users don't have decent devices for internet surfing and even if they had, they don't have permanent access to cheap fast internet.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/comscore-reports-feb...
That's not too far off 50 percent.
https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/statcou...
Because the users who buy things on mobile overwhelmingly use iPhones. All the money to be made is there.
I spoke with Tencent a month ago and they said over half of their users (across wechat/QQ etc...) are on iOS. That was a surprise to me as I thought Android phones completely dominated the Chinese market.
Likely that Android does dominate the Chinese market like the rest of the world.
I think a better way to view it is to segment the mobile device market into 3: high, middle and low end; Apple dominates the high-end market segment. iPhones are still largely considered a status symbol in China.
It's possible iOS users use their phones more, or some variation on that.
The average time each user spends using their Android device(s), and those users' average affluence, is so incredibly low that they still only manage to make up 50% of Google's ad revenue on mobile.
iOS users are way more likely to be (relatively) wealthy, and they tend to use their devices more (if you've suffered through using anything other than a top-end Android device from the last couple of OS versions, you can guess what one of several reasons for this may be).
https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/statcou...
To first order, iPhone owners spend money. Android owners don't. This is because your average iPhone user cares more about what phone they're using and simply uses it more.
This is a first-order approximation. The small percentage of people who actively choose Android do spend and do use their phones a lot, and by goodness are they vocal, but the more useful way of thinking about the market is not two-segment, it's three-segment:
* Vast majority: don't care about their phone OS, won't pay for anything
* Significant minority: want iPhones, will most probably spend money
* Significant but even smaller minority: actively want Android, will buy premium Android phones (e.g. Nexus, high-end Samsung), will either spend money or, with roughly equal likelihood, jailbreak and pirate everything in sight.
From this perspective iOS remains the most compelling mobile OS to target. Additionally, iOS users – on average - use apps more and for longer, though again that effect is small when you control for the kind of Android devices people go out of their way to choose.
More like, is willing to spend $700 on a phone.
The problem with android is that even the "high end" android phones (in the US anyway) are still just wrappers around the snapdragon 8xx SOCs. They're all exactly the same and feel almost as closed as the iphone.
iPhones have a warranty at list price; AppleCare extends it and increases the scope of service.
I do agree that anyone who plans on purchasing an extended warranty for any product research it ahead of time so the total purchase price fits into their budget, though, and the same goes for sales taxes.
FTFY
That fine if you're trying to make money, but it still annoys me when something like a government or non-profit targets iPhone first.
In fact, I'd say "target the web" if you're going for maximum accessibility and you're not driven by commercial factors, though that doesn't work for every app and the usability/discoverability issues can be real. Favoring any commercial platform as a government is a very uncomfortable place to be.
Given group 1 is many times bigger than group 2, that's a very strong statement, but it's borne out in all the data I've ever seen, both public and private.
It's crazy considering even if Apple switched default search engines I'm sure a lot of users would switch back to Google.
In 2015, it was reported that "Apple ... receives 5 billion requests per week for its mapping services and that Apple Maps is used 3.5 times more frequently than ... Google Maps."
http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/apple-google-maps-ios/
and iOS users are the wealthy layer of the mobile marketplace. they're the cream. google doesn't want to lose them.
[1] http://www.siliconbeat.com/2017/03/06/many-iphones-use-analy...
I use Apple services for quite a few things, so whenever I hear about a data breach I evaluate how I use the service and how I can guard against similar breaches that might affect my data.
EDIT: I should point out that this applies to other services that I use as well. This is something everyone who relies on a 3rd party service should keep an eye on as a matter of course.
Even if Apple had data breaches that it was responsible for (you do know that the celebrity titty-shot photos were all social-engineered/re-used passwords right? None were actually iCloud breaches), that isn't about privacy, that's about security.
Google literally builds profiles about it's products (the eyeballs looking at *.google.com) to better place ads in front of said eyeballs, because that's how they make 90% of their money.
Apple does everything it can to anonymise what data it does need to see: there's no sign-in for maps, it reset's it's random identifier periodically, and each route is split into multiple segments.
Waze is superior in so many ways. It knows (most) contruction sites/road closures (there are many where I live), Waze tells me about speed traps and accidents. Maybe not the best UI, but I definitely get the best results. And I enjoy submitting Road closures etc myself - hoping that I am helping others get where they want faster/without unexpected issues. It's not perfect, but it has definitely saved me a lot of time.
But it's subject to flights of fancy similar to MapQuest circa 2002 where you find yourself taking some strange back road to save little or no travel time.
With no traffic, it's spot on. I feel like it doesn't account for traffic that develops during the commute. Given the length of my travel, the roads may be clear when I start, but very congested before I finish.
At least on Android, clicking a location link will allow you to open it in any installed application that's registered to handle it.
Sadly, that's true. I'm a big maps' aficionado and as such I prefer the Hybrid View (satellite + roads) whenever I'm looking for an address or POI on GMaps. I've noticed that the majority of people I interact with (work colleagues, closed ones) only use GMaps on maps view, and as such they don't know how to make sense of where exactly their desired POI is, because when they zoom in on it they usually see only some colored background with some lines (i.e. roads) on the side. While when using the Hybrid view you can actually see the buildings themselves and other physical reference points (a forest, a football field, a parking lot etc), which makes it way more easier for you when you actually want to get to said POI.
As such, I fully believe that for these types of people switching Apple Maps in place of GMaps would make no difference at all, it's just switching a blob of colored backgrounds and lines with another blob of colored backgrounds and lines, while GMaps' preeminence, IMHO, is in its exceptional and unique satellite views quality.
I didn't know google maps did this or I would have used it. I was using Waze instead, as it's my default.
I made a conscious effort to use Apple Maps, Google Maps and Waze and found Apple & Google to be equivalent for routing. Sometimes the routes varied, but they were pretty solid. Waze was either super-useful time saver or a complete waste of time.
I was flabbergasted when it suggested a bed and breakfast in Cape Town, South Africa, instead of the one 3 miles away by the same name. (I'm in the US)
Also, Google Maps has become much less good for driving, since you frequently have to zoom in quite far to see a street name. I don't know if Apple Maps is better, but I know that Google Maps used to show a lot more street names. It would be nice to have a choice about whether I see businesses and landmarks or street names, rather than making it for me.
Google still wins on the lane awareness but that's their only advantage.
It absolutely staggers me that nobody seems to bother making sure street names are actually visible on the map. I don't know how anyone that ships navigation software without visible street names sleeps at night.
That's the worst thing with Google Maps for me. It drives me mad when I'm trying to navigate on foot. I never trust the compass in my phone, so figuring out my direction by looking at street names is actually pretty important. (I prefer doing that anyway, because that's just how people use maps). It's to the point where if a street actually doesn't have a name, I'll still spend a minute trying to trick Google Maps into showing one because there's no way to tell.
Does Apple do a better job with it?
>>Google still wins on the lane awareness but that's their only advantage.
In the past I've preferred listening to Google Maps while driving, rather than listening to Apple Maps.
I just bought a car that supports Apple Carplay. My first impression is it's pretty damn good. A nice chunk of the display is dedicated to the distance to the next turn, the name of the street to turn onto, an arrow showing the direction of the turn, etc.
Presumably "Android Carplay" or whatever Google calls it is also good. The point is that a smartphone integrated with a display screen on the dash produces a much nicer driving experience than a smartphone by iteslf.
Edit: BTW this only works well if you've entered a destination. The Carplay display of Apple Maps is total crap in terms of street names etc if just randomly driving around. Maybe that's your complaint with Google? You mean while driving around rather than navigating to a specific destination?
Perhaps I just haven't figured out how to make Apple Maps display better without entering a destination.
I used it briefly at the time and it was worse than the media hype suggested, in the worst case routing me back and forth across most of the North-South axis of California for a cross-town trip.
> While it was worse than Google Maps it was still as good or better than most automaker nav and portable units people were accustomed to using.
Even with a map database that is now a decade out of date, my Prius's onboard nav has never given me the kind of problems Apple Maps did in my brief period of using it, and its had far more opportunity.
If you want the convenience of Apple Watch, Siri, or CarPlay, you are stuck using Apple Maps. It's a shame, because I love my Apple Watch for two main reasons: being able to control music and navigation in the car. My 2015 GTI was one year prior to VW's introduction of CarPlay, and this damn watch gets me about 80% of the way there without a $2k retrofit.
If I know where I'm going before I get in my car, it's Google Maps for me. More POIs, fewer outdated addresses or incorrect business hours, and better traffic negotiation.
> Several months after Apple Maps became the default, something like 2/3rds of all users switched away from Google Maps.
When Apple Maps 'became the default', what actually happened was it outright replaced the Google-powered Maps app entirely, and there was no replacement Google-written Maps app _for_ several months. People didn't 'switch away', they were switched, you could not stay on google maps if you wanted to.
Per your numbers, 1/3rd of a platform switching back (despite having to wait months and install a new app to do so) sounds like a pretty big return to me. But I don't think there's a lot we can infer about users' propensity to set search engine defaults vs propensity to install/use apps.
Even today (the actually happened this morning), I type an address two blocks away and I'm shown an address in Portugal. I live in Argentina. Why it assumed I was looking for a street across the Atlantic Ocean rather than one within walking distance is beyond me (also, the street name did not match).
This also happens if I tap on a contact's address -- even though the contacts app shows the minimap with the right location.
It would be interesting to find out how many users switched back to Google after Yahoo paid Firefox to switch the default for new installs.
Apple would probably look at how much they could get from Bing for the privilege before building their own search engine.
Many, but the net effect was still positive for Yahoo.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoos-firefox-deal-tells-us-pai...
So, 3bn is peanuts for 25% of mobile ad revenue, which for google is 50bn/yr.
Apple would probably have to raise the price several times over before Google starts questioning this relationship.
You are sure...but Google is placing a $3,000,000,000 bet against your word. Maybe they're losing money the deal to moat their castle, but who knows.
As a side note: If the government worked correctly, Google would not have been allowed to buy market share, monopoly and all.
Do you also think government should prevent Google from paying Mozilla to be the default search engine in Firefox?
Yes I do. And for the same reason I'd oppose Verizon or ATT buying everyone else.
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share Search engine market share Worldwide | StatCounter Global Stats
Google knows how much money it makes through iPhone... a potential competitor could only guess how much money could be made by being the new default search engine (especially since the number of people who would be loyal to Google and switch away from the new default is a big unknown).
It's interesting to see exactly how valuable it is (or how valuable people think it is) to be the market leader.
If Google lost the iPhone default position, their customers (i.e. advertisers) would see them differently.
Doesn't always even matter. It's branding and advertising for google. Same type of thing as a company spending $5m on Superbowl ads. Idea isn't to ring up sales (or in the case of google clicks). Goodyear has the blimp nobody is buying tires directly my point being there is a value to the indirect advertising and marketing.
They could conceivably setup a search engine as a pro-privacy move by deliberately not collecting/monetizing user's search data, and perhaps not even running ads at all if they can figure out some other way to pay for it or justify the expense. However, I agree with you that it feels wrong. I think I'd feel better about a new search engine if it was run by a less profit-driven institution, like the Internet Archive.
Maybe the best course of action if Apple wanted a Google alternative to exist is to develop some of the technology in-house and then give a giant grant to some well-respected pro-privacy organization to actually run the thing.
MS, Yahoo and many others would disagree.
It is stupid to become reliant on Google. Even though their solution would not be as good, they need to have something in case Google cuts them off.
I think the End Game will be Apple providing very good, high quality curated Search Results for its Users, Eating up to 40% of Google's Mobile revenue. ( 80% of searches and 50% of Mobile Revenue coming from iPhone ).
That is, of course assuming Apple could do Searches or Services, judging from the few years of Apple Map, Apple Music, iCloud etc. This segment is simply not in their DNA.
Notes: Some may argue Apple's Services Revenue continues to increase, but if you look at the break down majority of it are from App Store, and majority of App Store Revenue are from Gaming, which ironically is a category Apple doesn't care much.
So, if I want to check the versions of haproxy in the various Debian suites, then `!dpkg haproxy` would take me to https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=haproxy.
If I just want general results about HAproxy, that isn't what a bang is for.
I use DDG for home laptop, but often use g! prefix for things like flight data or image searches.
Define "best"? By what metric?
Given that we know Google use your own search history to influence current search result rankings, there is a bubble effect. I don't consider that to be a good thing. Their privacy policy and general business model (give away services for 'free' and data-mine the living bejesus out of user content to make creepy stalker-level profiles of them, for the purposes of showing adverts) are very much at odds with what I want from a search engine, or any business really.
I've yet to see anyone do a comparison of Google with browser settings such that they can't use previous search history to influence results, vs other search engines which don't rely on history for relevance anyway.
For me, DDG is good enough that I use it all the time on all my devices. I use !bangs, but the only google-related Bang I've used at all recently is !tr (Google Translate).
Its business.
Wasn't there a period just a few years ago when Apple switched to Bing platform wide? Or am I mistaken?
If you want google you have to explicitly tell Siri to search using Google.
My previous Android phone, a 2013 Moto X bought while Google owned the cell phone part of Motorola and was promising users (finally) timely, consistent updates, was largely abandoned with respect to updates within a year. This also involved Verizon, for me, who was promising... finally, timely and continuing updates, for this now Google phone -- no, really, believe us, despite our history.
So... I guess Google better be paying someone to maintain their presence in mobile.
Maybe they should have paid me and all their other Android users a little better attention. Because I'm seriously considering an iPhone as a replacement for my 5X brick.
All from third parties. I haven't seen any useful, official response, yet -- except for some warranty replacements supposedly for units still under warranty. (But then, bye-bye data...)
I'll have a look at your link, now. Appreciate it!
P.S. "Heat"... I've rather pampered my 5X, but I did -- with all the intention of taking it in with me to the restaurant -- leave it in my car's dashboard compartment for an half hour to an hour, where I had atypically placed it while driving because the passenger seat was full of stuff. That compartment's door closed itself while driving due to shaking and gravity, and I forgot.
It was cloudy when I went in, but sunnier when I came out, and the phone had gotten pretty warm while still running. Not melty warm, and it was idling during that time. My friends treat their phones far worse.
It seemed to be fine, when I came out. But now that I think about it, a few days later, I experienced the bootloop.
Then again, the phone had spontaneously restarted 2 or 3 times in the past few months, while I was using it. On those occasions, though, it promptly and successfully rebooted.
The phone's only about 1.3 years old. I've heard some people have had success claiming a replacement, even out of the official warranty. Seems to be a matter of chance or/and reaching the right person.
1. Open IE 6 (although this was only a few years ago, my org was slow to upgrade).
2. Use some weird in browser search tool and enters "Google"
3. This brings up a Bing search results for "Google"
4. Clicks on the first result, which is for the homepage of Google.com
5. Enters original search term in Google.com
It's amazing what you can see when you watch users work.
For example, we have a small CTA with email and location. I'm not sure one person has entered both fields correctly.
Every time I use those SE, I realize how good Google is.
Money should flow from product companies to advertising companies; there is something sinister about money moving in the opposite direction.
Right now you can choose in the settings app between Google, Bing, Yahoo and Duck Duck Go, but only a small percentage of people change the setting.
If the setting was more prominent, and Google wasn’t the preselected first option, Google would lose a lot of market share on iOS.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/europ...
In my native Sweden, using anything other than Google is pretty much unheard of.
I believe the average American internet user is ahead of the curve in this respect, using Bing and other search engines which are probably as good for most queries as Google is.
I try to stay away from Google and use DDG but if I search for anything local outside, Google's results are much better than the competition
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/uni...
1. People who don't even notice the change 2. People who notice, but are too lazy or ignorant to change it 3. People who notice, put off changing it, and leave it 4. People who notice, but consider searching results a commodity product at this point and don't care 5. People who notice, have a real preference AND actually change it back
Obviously I'm too lazy to write all of the possibilities, but I find the differences in search engines to be less and less noticeable at this point. Of course, I have no actual expertise in search engines beyond personal experience so this is just me typing on the internet.
Google started with paying other software companies to bundle Google Toolbar in with their software, which would change your default search to Google. (This behavior was later changed to Google Chrome, which you still get with a dozen other programs today.) This is actually a big part of Sundar Pichai's claim to fame at Google, and likely chiefly why he is CEO today: He's responsible for Google being the default place for search.
As noted in this article, Google has been paying to be default on the iPhone for years, and Google used to be the highest bidder for Firefox's default search spot as well (and still is in several other countries besides the US).
People use the default, and Google invested an incredible amount of money in ensuring they were the default everywhere. Google has been the default in both Chrome and Firefox for many years, and used the Toolbar to change people's default in IE, and has also been the default on both iOS and Android mobile phones. And that is why Google has the market share it does today.
Heck MS owns PC and down to tiny share with Bing. Look at browsers in 2016 we had 300 million leave and mostly go to Google.
http://www.businessinsider.com/300-million-users-ditched-mic... Over 300 million users ditched Microsoft's browsers in 2016 ...
It would be a huge propaganda and traffic coup for MSFT to be the default search engine on iPhone. MSFT won't pay /more/ than Google (if they were currently willing to do so, they would already by the default), but if Google was to not pay, MSFT would definitely jump in and pay Apple something, which is better than nothing.
For all we know, its actual value to Google is much higher than what they're paying, but with nobody else able or willing to pay what it's actually worth, they're able to pay much less.
Another factor worth considering is that Apple's been pushing pretty strong for user privacy across the platform. It's possible they're leveraging that to extract more from Google, when other providers (like DuckDuckGo) might pay less, but be willing to offer better privacy protections.
To be compelling, doing so would either have to earn them the cost of the service plus £3bn a year, or it would have to mitigate a strategic risk. With maps, Google had turn by turn directions on Android but wouldn't add it on iOS. The only way for Apple to get that feature was to do it themselves. But there are no such risks with Search and there is always Bing.
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-will-challenge-googl...
either way, Apple removing Google Search will really hurt Google
Apple could use many alternatives (DDG, Startpage) or make their own. Google is lucky they get to pay a few billion instead of contending with Apple Search or Apple switching to alternatives.
There are only two [general purpose, global] search engines in the world right now: Google and Bing.
And of the two Google is clearly superior. I suspect most people would use it even if Bing was the default.
That contradicts what I find on Wikipedia.
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes – grey boxes above the results that display topic summaries and related topics.
I suspect that they initially attempted to do this, but as far as I know these days it's basically Bing. Maybe with a small amount of other sources mixed in.
I'd imagine legal ramifications for Apple but I do think Apple has options that keep Google paying billions.
Most people are not techies and are lazy. Sure maybe their kids will switch it or their friend will tell them to do so, but MANY devices will stick with the default.